Author
Topic: Your favorite basic weapons

A lot of rpgs are known for having some pretty awesome and op legendary weapons. I'm interested in knowing about weapons you like that don't meet that category but are great for whatever reason. There's three basic weapons I really like though two of them overlap with each other.

Boomerangs (Dragon Quest series): I love the fact that they hit all enemies and the way damage works(100%-80-etc). While they're not the best for bosses they do help tremendously for dealing with groups generic enemies. For the most part only the hero can use them but I thought it was cool in 7 that Gabo could also use them. Recently I did a boomerang run of Dragon Quest 8 and was able to beat the game much faster.

Hand axes & Javelins (Fire Emblem series): I lumped these two together because they serve the same purpose. Having 1-2 combat range gives a unit good enemy phase when it comes to dealing with combatants such as mages, archers and the like. There's also the fact plenty of enemies are 1 range so many of them are unable to counterattack. They do break fast but the plus side is that these weapons are often on the cheap side. I'm not sure how I feel about the big nerf these weapons received in Fates considering shurikens and the royal swords have no drawbacks.

^ Cool choice Starmongoose. I hadn't really considered style and apparel when making this thread.

Generally speaking, most weapons only really care about killing things being naughty in your sight. After all, when you get right down to it, a thrown Barrel is a good as a power grid draining Destructo Ray at destroying giant robots. After that, style is all you really have.

Greataxes, greatswords, and gloves/barehanded. The first 2 are more for impressive numbers so I like them in turn based games or games that don't require a lot of input for attacks, while gloves generally have awesome combo potential and speed while still allowing for stupidly impressive damage. Also barehanded options sometimes allow for countering which I like using when possible.

Even the most basic weapons are stylized like crazy in video games, comic books, movies, etc. On my most recent trip to India, I visited a kalari (dojo) where they teach kalari-payattu (an ancient Indian martial art that's possibly the influence for the animal-based subsets of kung-fu) and was shown demonstrations of both hand-to-hand techniques and weapons. Two of the weapons I saw were the chakra and the urumi (basically a whip-sword.) Both were rather plain looking in terms of style, but quite effective when used properly.

Watching the guy wield the urumi was wild! That is such a complicated weapon to wield, since you can seriously injure yourself with it if you lost control. It's handled more like a whip, but because it has a heavier blade than a whip's leather tail, it requires modified technique.

In Indian combat, chakram are a throwing weapons somewhat comparable to Japanese shurikens. Warriors would often carry loads of chakram. In the Indian comics I read, a warrior would spin a chakra on his finger then let it fly. FWIW: the word "chakra" literally means circle in Sanskrit and "chakram" is plural.

Coming back to the topic, along with the staff (as mentioned with McDohl because it's rare for an RPG protagonist to wield that instead of a sword) I can dig a good pair of knives or daggers. Nothing flashy, but quite effective in rendering multiple strikes in quick succession.

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You can brag about your 5000+ friends on social media all you want, but riddle me this: how many of them would help you move?

Great Axe's have a special place in my heart for the sheer mayhem they can cause, but I've always had a soft spot for suikoden's 2 main protag and his tonfa. I personally can't recall a game outside of nioh atm where those are used by the main protag.

Great Axe's have a special place in my heart for the sheer mayhem they can cause, but I've always had a soft spot for suikoden's 2 main protag and his tonfa. I personally can't recall a game outside of nioh atm where those are used by the main protag.

Great Axe's have a special place in my heart for the sheer mayhem they can cause, but I've always had a soft spot for suikoden's 2 main protag and his tonfa. I personally can't recall a game outside of nioh atm where those are used by the main protag.

Skies of Arcadia, with bonus points for also being a Cutlass.

I mean he wields them SOMEWHAT like tonfa, but they are just cutlasses. Not really sure what they were aiming for when they made his weapons work that way but yeah....